Report: WaPo Missed the Real China Story on Sex-Selective Abortions

The Washington Post story “Too Many Men” totally missed the point regarding the underlying causes of China’s disastrous gender imbalance, a new essay notes, since it refused to address the problem of sex-selective abortions under China’s two-child policy.

Writing in Breakpoint on May 11, Eric Metaxis claims it is the Washington Post’s “worldview” that blinded the newspaper to the real cause of China’s demographic nightmare.

Currently in China, there are a staggering 34 million fewer women than men, meaning that many marriage-age men are unable to find a spouse or raise a family.

In its April 18 story, the Washington Post noted this fact, but then proceeded to attribute the massive gender gap to a “combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology.”

The Post carefully danced around the real issue, Metaxis says, which is that tens of millions of unborn baby girls were aborted — “killed in the womb simply because they were female.”

In a culture that treats women’s “reproductive rights” as if it were a sacrament, the newspaper cannot bring itself to condemn the horrific practice of sex-selective abortions, knowing that the same issue is currently being debated—and argued in court—in the United States of America.

Last September, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Walton Pratt—an Obama appointee—issued a permanent injunction against Indiana’s “Sex Selective and Disability Abortion Ban,” following a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood.

The Indiana law banned gender-selective abortions and those based on a prenatal diagnosis of disabilities such as Down syndrome, to keep abortion from being used as a eugenic tool to weed out children considered “undesirable.”

In her ruling, Judge Pratt defended sex-selective and disability-based abortions, stating that “it is a woman’s right to choose an abortion that is protected, which, of course, leaves no room for the State to examine, let alone prohibit, the basis or bases upon which a woman makes her choice.”

In its 5,300-word story, the Washington Post used the word “abortion” just once, and not to refer to China’s problem of sex-selective abortions,

“For decades,” Metaxis noted in his analysis, “western family planning groups, such as International Planned Parenthood Fund and the United Nations Population Fund, have promoted abortion on a massive scale as the solution to many of the world’s problems. They’ve worked with leaders in both China and India, urging them to bring down their population levels through abortion and sterilization.”

In other words, western abortion promoters are partially to blame for China’s demographic crisis because of their refusal to debate or even consider restrictions on abortions. Instead, they have promoted it (and sometimes imposed it) as a panacea for the world’s economic problems.

If the mainstream media continue to defend abortion on demand, they have little grounds for hand-wringing over China’s woes, which are caused by the same sex-selective abortion that is legal in the United States, and fiercely protected by groups like Planned Parenthood.

When it comes to abortion and demographics, you just cannot have it both ways.